The Traitor Baru Cormorant (58 page)

“How?” she whispers. “How could you know?”

“Your red-haired handler thought it safe to explain these things to a dead woman. It was a long journey east.” Again Tain Hu shrugs. Again her wine lies still, as if boasting of her precision in all things. “I wanted to understand the woman behind the mask I knew. I spoke with him at length.”

Baru closes her eyes. She must have known what she was giving Apparitor in exchange, just as she knew what she was doing at Sieroch, at the Fuller's Road. Of course she knew. Of course she knew.

“And what did he ask in return? What was it safe for a dead woman to tell?”

Tain Hu's mouth does not move but her eyes tighten in a little smile.

“Tell me.” Baru leans across the table, across the blade. “Tell me what secrets you gave the Throne. Or does your play at loyalty not extend so far?”

Tain Hu does not flinch. “What secrets could I know about Baru Fisher? What truth did you ever give me?” She laughs quietly. “You were wise. You trusted only yourself.”

“There was one,” Baru says, her voice terrible to her own ears, burdened with the memory of crimes more beautiful and dear than rebellion or treachery.

Tain Hu looks at her own hands. She sets her glass down on the table, motion by motion, as if in awe of the working of her joints. “There was that.” She nods thoughtfully. “But I wondered: Should I mention it? Would he care to know a lie? How would knowing a lie serve the purposes of the Throne, which seeks to bind by truth?”

There was that
. That one night, and everything it acknowledged.

“It was no lie,” Baru whispers.

“I wondered that, in the long nights after Sieroch,” Tain Hu whispers in return. “I wondered if you could be fool enough to fall that way, even knowing what you were meant to do. I wondered if all the things you whispered in the night could be real, instead of a clever act, a way to blind me. I did not think you a fool, Baru Fisher, but of course I did not think myself a fool either, and yet I was.”

She leans forward, palms flat, the sandy ruin of her close-shorn hair still damp with seawater. Her nearness summons sedition in Baru's chest.

“So I told him,” she says.

So the Throne has its secret. Tain Hu has her small revenge. Hot iron for the sodomite, and for tribadists, the knife. Not
now,
of course, not while she is loyal. But if Baru Cormorant ever turns, ever slips, ever becomes a threat—the knife.

“I have counsel for you, now that we've both struck our blows,” Tain Hu says. She leans forward on arms still corded with the memory of strength, and Baru remembers her leaning across the map table at Vultjag, pointing to weakness, here, there. “As your general.”

Look where your counsel has taken you, Baru thinks bitterly. Why should I listen?

But Tain Hu did not defeat herself.

“Speak,” Baru says.

Tain Hu's broad shoulders tighten. “You should kill me. To defy the Throne and secure your power.”

“Have you heard nothing?” Baru snaps. “Did their man confuse you? I prove my loyalty by killing you, Hu. It would be no defiance.”

“You will fail,” Tain Hu says. “They know it. They hope for you to fail.”

In the lamplight the wine between them looks as clotted as old blood. “I need only give an order,” Baru says, and then, with a taunting spite she does not feel: “I can give hard orders, Duchess.”

“You need to watch it happen, unflinching, unmoved. And you cannot.” Tain Hu looks into the empty distance, watching her own death. “You will see the tide rising and you will beg for them to spare me. They will agree. They will grant you your ascension, and they will keep me as a pet, knowing you will do anything to keep me from harm.
I
will be their hold on you.”

A flicker like the ghost of a smile at the edge of her lips. “Better for you,” she says, “if you had let me die at Sieroch. Better if you had never tried to save me.”

Baru wants to protest but it chills like truth. It has been in her dreams these past months, as she wondered what her final test would be: spare
her, spare her; I will do anything to spare her. “But they have the secret they need,” she protests. “You gave it to them. They
have
a hold.”

“They would prefer something more … concrete. They fear you, Baru Fisher. They fear your wit, your charisma, your power to raise the commoner. They fear the loyalty you command. Without a powerful secret to bind you—something more than hearsay, and a curious absence of lovers—they fear the strength you will have among them.” Tain Hu closes her distant eyes. “He told me none of this. He told me he expected you to execute me without a second thought. But you taught me to listen to myself when I sensed a lie.”

The little distance across the table maddens like a rotten tooth. Baru wants to reach out to her, across all the blood and treachery between them. Wants to reach back across the months to winter on the forage line. “Why would you tell me this?” she asks. “Why would you give me
anything
?”

“Because it was no lie,” Tain Hu whispers, and turns away.

Baru sits, and stares, and tries to make something of the hollow in her chest.

Her mind gnaws at all of it: could it be that Tain Hu is desperate to live, and hopes to trick Baru into sparing her? No, she would have no care for her own life, not with Vultjag and Aurdwynn lost—but could she be working to sabotage Baru's ascension, manipulating her into showing disloyalty to the Throne? Could this all be the Throne's test, like the boy on the battlements, played out through a broken Tain Hu?

She sips at her wine, pretending calm, and grips the edge of a cold truth: she came down here to speak with Tain Hu because she hoped it would make it easier to watch her die. Hoped there would be hate, shouting, vows of undying revenge. An enemy woman for her to drown tomorrow.

If I beg, she could live, Baru thinks. I would still have the Throne. They would sit easier for it, knowing I could be kept tame. And with time, she might forgive me—

Tain Hu's shoulders begin to shake. Baru's stomach curls. This, of all things, she hoped not to see: the general of Aurdwynn's armies broken and cast low. Death would be better.

But Tain Hu does not cry. She chuckles, raspy, low. “The hope of Aurdwynn!” she calls, as if rallying an invisible shield-wall. “Justice from a fairer hand!” And then she laughs, trembling with her mirth, quaking in her shackles, her eyes locked on Baru. “The hope of Aurdwynn!”

It goes on and on, and after a moment Baru finds it too much to take. She turns her chair to the left, so that the duchess Tain Hu falls away into nothingness, and the howl of her laughter reaches Baru only as an echo.

The hope of Aurdwynn, she thinks. And understands Tain Hu's game. She is still fighting.

The blade is still on the table, in the empty place to her right. Baru finishes her wine in slow silence. She wonders if Tain Hu knows about her wound. Whether she laughs and rails even now, and takes Baru's answering silence for strength.

*   *   *

T
HE
tide comes in just before dawn. Baru Cormorant shackles the prisoner herself. Whispers one Urun word in her ear, laden, an eel-bite, and then draws away to say, perhaps in mockery:

“Congratulations on your victory, Duchess Vultjag.”

Tain Hu does not weep.

Baru commands her marines to take Tain Hu down onto the stone bluffs below the castle, where the waves are harshest.

Tain Hu walks the whole way, even burdened by her chains. The marines fasten her to the stone, threading her shackles through rusted brackets. The sea laps and murmurs below.

Baru Cormorant, lord in passing of the Elided Keep, ascendant member of the Imperial Republic's ruling committee, watches from a spit of rock above. Apparitor paces behind her, his hair wild in the salt breeze. “If the wind picks up, the waves may dash her against the rocks,” he says. “It would be a terrible death.”

Baru stands without a coat, untroubled by the cold. It is not so deep as winter in Vultjag. “So it would,” she says. “But Tain Hu was strong once. If she clings to her own chains, she may last long enough to drown.”

Apparitor takes her by the shoulder. “Perhaps there is another way. Perhaps the Throne would accept her as a hostage.”

“Do not test me,” Baru says, her eyes on the dawn horizon. She takes census of the birds there. Finds a hawk circling high, as if riding a thermal above a forest valley. “I have had enough of the Throne's little tests.”

The water rises. Tain Hu, wet to the waist, seems to drowse, her chains slack. “Hypothermia,” Apparitor whispers. “The water is cold, my lady. If we were to raise her now, perhaps we could save—”

“I do not want her saved,” Baru Cormorant says.

“Did you not love her?” the Throne's man hisses in her ear. “She told me about the night after your victory at Sieroch. You could have that again.”

“Is that what she invented? Curious.” Baru gestures to the marines on the rocks below. “Wake her up!”

One of them smashes Tain Hu in the shoulder with the butt of his polearm. She cries out, arching, her eyes wild. Her chains slip between pale, trembling fingers.

“‘You are a worth a legion to me, Tain Hu,'” the Throne's man whispers. “Do you remember that? She told me you said that.”

“I said many things.”

The water rises. A low wind whips up froth. Tain Hu shouts hoarsely into the spray, her chains wrapped taut around her fists, biceps straining.

Baru spares a glance for Apparitor. “When this little chore is through, I have business in Falcrest. We sent a message to Aurdwynn, a demonstration of our reach. Now is the time to buy their loyalty. Ease taxes, grant marriage licenses, take mercy on their little cults. Grant them a few freedoms more.”

“Causes you are familiar with, Lady Cormorant.” The Throne's man draws his cloak about him.

“Of course. I know why you want me. I understand these people in my bones, my blood.” She stares coldly down at Tain Hu. “Through me, you expand your control.”

I wish you could see me, Hu, she thinks. Unflinching. Unmoved. The hope of Aurdwynn, giving them no yoke over me.

Even betrayed, cornered, you planned the battle well. A savant's work.

“Ironic, isn't it?” she says. “She might have lived to see her people free.”

Apparitor has to shout above the whipping wind. “Why are you doing this? She could still live!”

You could still bind me with her, Baru thinks. If I just begged. If I just admitted what she was to me. I could go to Falcrest and sit at your table and you would know:
we have our hooks in her
. As they have their hooks in you.

But I will not be bound as you are. I will walk among your council and you will tremble at what you have unleashed.

A rising breaker crashes against the rocks. Tain Hu cries out into the dawn, trembling with effort. A frigate bird calls like a drum overhead.

Baru Cormorant sets her legs in a duelist's stance, closing off the Throne's man on her dead right, opening her left side to the dying woman below. She cuts at the air with a blade she does not have.

She accepted Apparitor's deal at the harborside in Treatymont thinking that she could trade Aurdwynn for rule of Taranoke. Why not? What would be lost, what evil done? The Masquerade would crush any rebellion. In her hands, she could ensure it was swift, merciful. And with her hard-won power, she could save her home.

But that will not be enough now.

Good-bye, she thinks. Good-bye,
kuye lam
. I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood.

The tide comes in. The Throne's man watches her, waiting for her to lift her eyes and make a census of the birds.

 

LETTERS

To my peers of the committee,

I hope that Itinerant has completed his case for my value as a contributor. I understand that my youth and heredity may arouse skepticism, but I assure you that my savancy has now been tested by experience.

I have completed my initial review of Apparitor's documents. We clearly face important strategic challenges: a resurgent Stakhieczi monarchy, backlash from our ongoing efforts to destabilize the federated governments of Oriati Mbo, an increasingly apparent pattern of epidemic disease in the unconquered west, and, of course, the disturbing findings of our expeditions across the Mother of Storms. (We must confront the possibility that these eyewitness accounts are not hallucinations, and that natural law on the supercontinent somehow differs from our own.)

In light of these challenges, I am heartened by the success of our colleague Hesychast's programs in the Metademe. The Clarified performed admirably in Aurdwynn. With increased access to Stakhieczoid and Maia germ lines via our subject populations in Aurdwynn and Sousward, I believe significant strides may be made toward new, specialized breeds.

In spite of these achievements, I urge the committee to recall my patron's favorite lesson. There are many kinds of power. As we continue to drive the Imperial Republic toward our goal of total causal closure, it is imperative that we avoid dependence on any single strategic instrument. Total, integrated control, from the basic mechanisms of heredity up through the ideological and intellectual movements of our entire empire, must remain our goal.

I look forward to working with you.

Regards,

Agonist

Dearest Aminata,

It's been too long. My service in Aurdwynn is at an end. For reasons beyond the scope of this letter, I will be traveling to Falcrest under an assumed name.

I read of your promotion to Lieutenant Commander. My congratulations. Upon her return to Falcrest, I intend to recommend you to Province Admiral Ormsment. You may wonder why a technocrat thinks to recommend you to a flag officer, and, well—more cause to hear my story!